The role of the metrical and rhyme pattern Mary Magdalene2004... · script of Mary Magdaleneis such...

Mary Magdalene è una mystery-morality play anonima, scritta probabilmente a ca-vallo del XV sec., quando il Great Vowel Shift iniziò ad esercitare la propria in-fluenza sul sistema fonetico del Medio Inglese.La confusione che avvolge ogni tentativo di analisi linguistica dell’opera – e diconseguenza ogni altro tentativo di definirne la scansione metrica precisa – ha lapropria base nello stereotipo dello scriba ‘incompetente’. In realtà, ciò che i curato-ri contemporanei dell’opera evidenziano come ‘errori grafici’ o come ‘forme obso-lete’ potrebbero corrispondere a una sorta di licenza poetica che l’autore si è presoper dare al testo il senso particolare che voleva conferire ad esso.In questo articolo, partendo dal presupposto che lo scriba di Mary Magdalene fossein realtà competente nel proprio lavoro, metteremo in evidenza quelle forme chesono sempre state classificate come errori degli scriba e le analizzeremo in conside-razione della loro funzione all’interno della scansione prosodica dell’opera. Dimo-streremo che in Mary Magdalene la ragione per cui tali varietà ‘fuorvianti’, ascrittealla mancata comprensione dello scriba, sono state selezionate dall’autore sta neltentativo di realizzare uno schema prosodico preciso corrispondente agli scopi poe-tici dell’autore stesso. Tali forme verranno classificate in due categorie: (a) formeparticolari che possono essere spiegate dalla struttura metrica della stanza in cui sitrovano, e (b) varietà linguistiche, non comprese dai filologi, che possono essere ri-costruite etimologicamente grazie allo schema ritmico della stanza in cui si trova-no. Il risultato finale è che lo schema metrico e ritmico dell’opera ha un ruolo fon-damentale nell’identificare quelle varietà diacroniche e diatopiche, usate dall’autoredi Mary Magdalene, che sono sempre state apparentemente considerate come privedi senso e perciò sottovalutate in studi pregressi.

1. Introduction

Mary Magdalene is an anonymous mystery-morality play probablywritten at the turn of the 15th century, when the Great Vowel Shift(henceforth GVS) began to exert its influence. The overall linguistic as-pects of the play have already been analysed (Baker / Murphy 1976;

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STEFANIA M. MACI

The role of the metrical and rhyme patternin Mary Magdalene

Baker / Murphy / Hall 1982; Bevington 1975, Devlin 1965, Donovan1977; Furnivall 1882; Grantley 1983; Pollard 1890, Schmidt 1885) andattempts have been made to ascertain the regional and / or dialectal areaof provenance, with the result that its language has been identified asbelonging to the East-Midland dialect (Furnivall 1882; Pollard 1890;Devlin 1965; Bevington 1975; Baker / Murphy 1976; Donovan 1977;Baker / Murphy / Hall 1982; Grantley 1983). Attempts have also beenmade to describe the metrical scansion and the rhyme pattern of the playthat seem chaotic to most editors (Baker / Murphy 1976; Baker / Mur-phy / Hall 1982; Bevington 1975, Devlin 1965, Donovan 1977; Furni-vall 1882; Grantley 1983; Pollard 1890, Schmidt 1885). According tothem, evidence for this claim is to be found in the fact that the manu-script of Mary Magdalene is such a bad and a hurried copy of the origi-nal text that it has been classified as the earliest pirated copy of an Eng-lish play (see, for instance, Baker / Murphy / Hall 1982: 31-32). Thismay well be true. Nevertheless, in the linguistic analysis of the play, it isprecisely the rhyme and the metrical scansion that can help us to under-stand either the meaning of a word or the use of one dialectal and / orarchaic form instead of another. The confusion looming over any lin-guistic analysis of the play – and consequently over any attempt to findits precise metrical scansion – rests on the general, misleading stereo-types, according to which scribes were incompetent in their work. Onthe contrary, scribes were not ‘fools’ (Laing 2001: 90)1 and when copy-ing their exemplars, with their own personal writing systems, they werereproducing a text maintaining the intents of its author. They probablymade mistakes, but what modern editors generally classify as ‘mis-spelling’ or ‘mistake’ or even as ‘obsolete’ forms (compared with theones occurring at that time) might actually correspond to poetical li-cence the author took to give the text the particular meaning he wanted(Maci 1999).

In this paper, starting from the assumption that the scribe of MaryMagdalene was competent in his copying, we will therefore highlightthose forms which have always been classified as scribal mistakes and

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10A more detailed explanation about the relationship between ME scribal practice and its con-temporary interpretation is offered by Laing 1999, 2000, 2001, and forthcoming. I am grateful toDr. Laing for permission to read her paper prior to publication. See also Maci (2003).

analyze them considering their function in the prosodic pattern of theplay. The paper will show that in Mary Magdalene the accomplishmentof a precise prosodic scheme is the reason why such ‘confusing’ vari-eties, ascribed to the scribe’s misunderstanding, have on the contrarybeen selected by the author for his own poetical purposes. Such formswill then be categorized into two classes: (a) peculiar forms that can beexplained by the metrical structure of the stanzas where they occur, and(b) peculiar varieties, misunderstood by scholars, that can be recon-structed etymologically thanks to the rhyme-pattern of the stanza inwhich they occur. The result will be that the metrical and rhyme pat-terns of the play have a fundamental role in identifying those diachronicand diatopic varieties employed by the Mary Magdalene author whichare apparently nonsense and have therefore been underestimated in pre-vious studies.

2. The manuscript: authorship, date and provenance.

The text of Mary Magdalene is preserved in the Bodleian MSS Dig-by 133, where it occupies ff. 95r–145r. The first page has the initialsM.B., identified as those of Myles Blomefylde (see Baker / Murphy /Hall 1982: ix-x for a detailed description of Myles Bloomfylde’s biogra-phy ). At the end, the words “explicit oreginale de Sancta Maria Mag-dalena” have been taken by editors as meaning that the MS referred to aplay. Since the text of Mary Magdalene in the MS Digby 133 is not theoriginal one but a very bad and hurried copy, it seems likely that thescribe copied the inscription found at the end of the original (Baker /Murphy / Hall 1982: xxvii).

The initials of Myles Blomefylde at the beginning of the play mightlead to the conclusion that he was the author of the play. Yet, the paperused has a watermark dated 1510–1525 which confutes the suppositionof Myles’ authorship, since Myles was born in 1525. The fact that thetext of Mary Magdalene is a copy, as said before, makes the identifica-tion of its author impossible.

Mary Magdalene is wholly in one hand and the scribal practice fol-lows the tradition of the 1520s. This, combined with the date of the wa-termark, has led some scholars (Baker / Murphy 1967, 1976) to the con-

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S. M. Maci, The role of the metrical and rhyme pattern in Mary Magdalene

clusion that the play had been written in the second decade of the 16th

century, and therefore later than 1485, the supposed date of compositiongiven by Furnivall (1882: 301). Yet, even if the scribal tradition and thewatermark suggest an early 16th century date, this might refer to thedate of the copying whereas the original play might be several yearsearlier than the surviving manuscript (Donovan 1977: xi).

On the basis of the linguistic study of the text, scholars (Furnivall1882: xiv and note to 53; Pollard 1890: 193; Devlin 1965-66: iv; Bev-ington 1975: 689; Donovan 1977: xv; Baker / Murphy / Hall 1982:xxxvi; Grantley 1983: 442) have agreed on an East Midland prove-nance, more closely identified as Norfolk or East Anglia.2

3. Versification, rhyme and alliteration in Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene has been regarded as the play bridging the gap be-tween mediaeval and modern drama (Saintsbury 1906: 337). Probablywritten at the turn of the 15th-16th centuries, it is clear that it reflects theprosody of that period – the ‘regular’ Old English (henceforth OE)prosody had been erased by a chaotic ME one which underwent the in-fluence of the Italian sonnet, classical verse, and the two combined to-gether. Of course, the resulting prosody could not be a success: the pat-tern of the Italian sonnet applied to verse in England before Wyatt andSurrey still showed the defects of English prosody and the use of classi-cal prosody in English was a failure – in a language characterized by ac-cent and intonation, the attempt to write in quantitative verses was notvery successful (Saintsbury 1906: 303-4, 318-9; Hollander 1981: 5).

No wonder, then, that the play shows a rather irregular metrical divi-sion. It has a four-stress verse, typical of the late medieval drama of EastAnglia (Baker / Murphy / Hall 1982: xxxiii ); it is generally in iambiclines, which may have from eight to sixteen syllables, especially in thefirst part. According to most editors, the metrical scansion of the playmight regularly point to iambs when the play is read silently and sylla-bles can be elided, but since in some cases final syllables cannot be syn-

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20Schmidt (1885: 385) claims the language of Mary Magdalene is in the West-Midlands dia-lect with features belonging to Kentish.

copated because of the rhyme, the scansion seems uneven. This is alsoin consideration of the fact that the lack of any norms of spelling in lateME, in general, and in the play, in particular, might result in the occur-rence of extra syllables which “can defeat the best efforts of a moderncritic” (Donovan 1977: xxvii ).

The stanzaic structure of Mary Magdalene is chaotic largely becauseof imperfect copying (Baker / Murphy / Hall, 1982: xxxiii; Schmidt1885: 387): more than 30 lines are missing, most of them intail–rhyming stanzas.3 The main sections of the play are in double qua-trains and tail–rhyming stanzas, following either an abab bcbc, an ababcdcd, an abab cdcd effe pattern, or even more complex ones. Consecu-tive stanzas are linked together thanks to rhyming verses; occasionally,unrhymed lines separate stanzas. Generally, however, stanzas end withone character’s speech or where the sense indicates the sentence shouldend (the only enjambement found in the play is probably at ll.2082-83);they also mark the conclusion of a scene.

Mary Magdalene is also characterized by a great use of alliteration,especially in boasting speeches, such as the Emperors’ opening speech(ll.1-19), Herod’s bombast (ll.140-166), Pilate’s vaunt (ll.229-243), andthe King of Marseilles’ boast (ll.925-49). It is worth noting that allitera-tion is used by evil and powerful characters, including devils. This useof alliteration is indicative of arrogance and impertinence. In some cas-es, alliteration underlines new directions of the play, particularly inopening speeches, such as the speech of Cyrus (ll.49-84), necessary tointroduce his part in the play. ‘Good’ characters generally do not use al-literation; if they do, alliteration has the function of emphasisingthemes. Minor characters normally do not employ alliteration, except inthe few burlesque scenes.

We must make two digressions here. Firstly, in the previous para-

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30Baker / Murphy / Hall (1982: xxxiv) postulate the loss as follows: four lines after l.228, thesecond half of an eight-line stanza with an aaabcccb-rhyme pattern; after l.237, the first b-line ofan ababbcbc double quatrain; the a rhyme line following l.328; two lines in the passage ll.498-536;a tail-rhyming line after l.542; the line after l.670; one line in the passage after l.726; three lines af-ter ll.737-739; the last c-line of the double quatrain formed by ll.846-52; the second b-line of anabab quatrain after line 920; the line after l.944; a c-line of an aaabcccb tail-rhyming stanza afterl.1175; a line in ll.1241-48; a c-line from an aabccb tail-rhyming stanza after l.1333; one line afterl.1353; one or two lines in ll.1349-55; one line between ll.1439-1445; the line after l.1495; one ortwo lines in ll.1520-25; the lines after l.1529, l.1701, and l.1893.

graph, we have seen it is commonly held that when Mary Magdalene isread silently and syllables can be elided, the metrical scansion of theplay points to an iambic structure. But if this is a play, this text was notto be ‘read silently’, but performed.4 Even if we admit that the play was‘read’, we must make a distinction between oral and silent readingmodes5. Silent reading requires such sub-skills as word analysis (phonicand phonemic awareness), word recognition, fluency, word meaning,and background knowledge; oral reading, instead, implies:

a reader’s perceptual skill at automatically translating letters into coher-ent sound representations, unitizing those sound components into recog-nizable wholes and automatically accessing lexical representations, pro-cessing meaningful connections within and between sentences, relatingtext meaning to prior information, and making inferences to supplymissing information. (Fuchs / Fuchs / Hosp 2001: 239-240).

The key point is the difference between the phonemic awareness ofsilent reading and the phonemic awareness and representation of oralreading. As it takes longer to read words aloud than to read them silent-ly, there is more time to process what one reads aloud. Silent reading,though maintaining our awareness of the syllable presence and phone-mic value, makes us skip some syllables rather than elide them in actualpronunciation.

Secondly, according to most editors, the metrical scansion of theplay seems chaotic and uneven, because of the lack of any norms ofspelling in late ME, which in the play resulted in the occurrence of extrasyllables. Yet, we must remember that the metrical scansion of the playis accentual and not syllabic: ME had a prosody based on the coinci-dence of metrical stress and word accent (Schipper 1910: 171-182). Asa matter of fact, some editors (Baker / Murphy / Hall 1982) have point-ed out that the play tends to be written in iambs which may have fromeight to sixteen syllables. It seems, therefore, that the presence or the

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40Baker / Murphy / Hall (1982: xxxiv) confirm the fact that “Mary Magdalene seems to havebeen a play that had an active life over some years”.

50Silent and oral reading modes differ a lot one from the other. A deeper insight into the issuecan be seen on the web site http://www.nifl.gov/readingprofiles (which lists the oral and silentreading skills).

absence of certain syllables is irrelevant to the realization of metricalstress. We must concede, however, that the metre seems chaotic. Indeed,when alliteration occurs in Mary Magdalene, the lines tend to resemblewhat Saintsbury calls doggerel, ‘i.e. a bad verse which attempts to a cer-tain norm or form and fails’ (1906: 337). As Saintsbury (1906: 392) re-calls, the limited poetical skills of the author are not to be blamed, butrather the massive influence of Italian and Classical prosody on theMiddle English (henceforth ME) one.

Furthermore, the absence of any spelling norms in ME does notmean that the exemplar copyists had was ‘corrupted’ or that the scribeswere not competent in their work. The fact that ME scribes did not feelany obligation either to preserve the original spelling or to “observecomplete consistency in adapting the spelling of [their] original to makeit conform to [their] own practice” (Brook 1963: 56) is not synonymouswith a ‘lower’ quality of the represented language. Normally, MEscribes, while copying their texts, would translate their exemplar intotheir own dialect. To be more precise, as better explained by Laing(forthcoming) any ME scribe could be either a Literatim, a Translatoror a Mixer. Literatim scribes had no difficulty in reproducing the lan-guage of the manuscript in exactly the same way as their exemplar, re-gardless of their regional or dialectal provenance. As Laing states, theysaw one language in one place and switched off their own language inthe operation. Translators had no difficulty in understanding the lan-guage of the manuscript and reproduced it in the linguistic variant theyrequired (in this case, their own dialect could switch on or off, accord-ing to their regional provenance and to whether the written forms oftheir exemplar were familiar to them or not). As Laing (forthcoming)further pinpoints:

a ‘translator’ […] did not need to adapt all the forms of his exemplar be-cause many were familiar to him, but […] did not increasingly changeless familiar forms to his own preferred usage as he settled into translat-ing mode.

Mixers were somewhat in the middle as they, very likely, started theirjob as literatim but switched on their language in progress (Laing forth-coming).

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We believe that the scribe of our only extant copy of Mary Magda-lene was a literatim because he reproduced the same diatopic and dias-tratic variants the author of the play might employ for his own poeticalpurposes, which explains why the language of our manuscript is so richin internal variants. If he had been a translator, for example, he wouldnot have maintained the –eth desinence in the present indicative pluralforms in a text where the language adopted clearly points to a Midlandsdialect,6 but would have smoothed all such variants in the only possiblefeatures allowed by his own dialect. As Laing (forthcoming) puts it, in‘the language of a literatim, the language of a scribe is irrelevant. Theperson(s) ‘become(s)’ the place(s) […] and/or the time(s)’.

This was a necessity, since not only texts but also scribes were notphysically linked to the area of their origin, as they could move about(Beadle 1991: 90, 93). It must be remembered that in ME the wholespelling system was undergoing a radical process of change. The Nor-man Conquest influenced written English with its widespread use ofFrench and Latin in England, although the drawing up of documents inEnglish did not completely cease. The resulting confusion forced scribesto adopt their own spelling system (Laing 1991: 33-39). While copying,scribes had to decode their original exemplars and to re-encode themwith different encoding solutions so as to make clear the sense and themeaning of the original manuscript (Laing 1999). In some cases, theyeven invented nonsensical spellings because they did not understand thestrange and archaic words used in the original text (Laing 1991: 39).

As to Mary Magdalene, its manuscript was copied by one scribe whohad an inconsistent style, probably due to the fact that his exemplar wasinconsistent, according to Baker / Murphy / Hall (1982: xxxi- xxxii).

In our examination of those particular forms categorized as ‘incon-sistencies’, ‘nonsensical spellings’ or ‘misspellings’ by modern editorswe found that they tend to be mainly caused by the metrical scansion,the rhyme requirements and the general prosodic pattern of the play.

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60The final desinence -eth used for the present indicative plural form was an OE Southern featu-re still found in early ME. Yet, we have discovered that in Mary Magdalene such a desinence did notoccur under the Southern influence: it was just a Southern graphical feature used with a Northerngrammar rule, according to which it was possible to use a plural desinence in the present indicativeonly when the subject of the sentence was a pronoun immediately preceding the verb. Further, in thetext of Mary Magdalene, this seems possible only when noble characters speak (Maci 2003).

3.1. The metrical scansion: the pleonastic use of ‘to do’.

Maci (2003) shows that some of the forms found in the play occurbecause of their function as social markers. This also seems the case ofthe pleonastic use of the verb to do, which occurs in the pagan Emper-or’s utterances and in those of Mary Magdalene’s pagan father, wheretheir bombasts are also underlined by alliteration, as well as in the con-verted King of Marseilles’ prayer. In all these cases, the pleonastic aux-iliary seems to be the prerogative of noble people’s speech. Yet, the verbto do used as a pleonasm has another function: that of creating addition-al syllables to accomplish the metrical scansion of the stanza in which itoccurs. The first case can be seen in ll.43-44:

(1) EMPEROR. Lord and lad to my law doth lowte!Is it nat so? Sey yow all wyth on showte!

It is the opening scene, in which the pagan Emperor appears in allhis futile power and strength. The rhythm of the speech is marked bythe scansion of the metrical feet: l.43 presents two trochees followed bytwo iambs, the latter of which is recalled by l.44 that begins with twotrochees followed by two anapaests. It seems as if the pitch of voice of apowerful man were accompanied by war-like drums, signalling therhythm of a marching soldier. All this is favoured by the pause providedby the unstressed doth.

The same war-like drum rhythm continues in l.61, where we findCyrus, Mary Magdalene’s father, demonstrating his own power to theaudience:

(2) & lord of Ierusalem who agens me don dare

The line opens with an initial iamb followed by three anapaests,closed by another iamb. Such parallelism is possible thanks to thepleonastic don which not only provides an unstressed syllable necessaryto accomplish the metrical pattern of the line, but also emphasises thepunishment implied by Cyrus’ words.

The last two instances of the pleonastic use of the verb to do are tobe found in the ‘moving’ scene (ll.1887-1898) in which the King of

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Marseilles, now converted to the Christian religion, sailing back fromRome where he has been baptized by St. Peter, stops at the rock wherehe had laid the dead body of his wife and the baby she had had. To hiswonder and to the audience’s relief, the baby is alive and healthy, and sois his mother. His happiness is expressed in a fervent prayer to the Lordwhich has its climax in l.1890:

(3) blyssyd be flat lord flat fle dothe socur

and in l.1897:

(4) A, fle sonne of grace on vs doth shynne!

Both lines have trochaic feet, a frame possible thanks to the occur-rence of dothe, the necessary stressed syllable. Therefore, in all the in-stances examined, the presence of the pleonastic do supports not onlythe alliteration running throughout, but also the creation of parallel ormirroring metrical feet along the line.

3.2. Metrical scansion and rhyme pattern:Southern infinitive desinences.

The presence of additional syllables necessary for metrical purposes ismost evident in other ‘scribal misunderstandings’. In the play there occursome infinitive verbs with the Southern desinence -en7 which have al-ways been regarded as scribal misspellings (Baker / Murphy / Hall 1982).However, the possibility of a scribal mistake in the play may be indirectlyconfuted by the fact that the Southern desinence is typical of monosyllab-ic verbs as in the case of shewyn (l.898) and of rewlyn (l.1689). There is,however, another case, abydyn (l.1990) which is disyllabic. Why is the fi-nal infinitive Southern desinence added in a linguistic environment thatdid not usually allow it? It can be observed that the final Southerndesinence does not occur in all situations, but only when such important

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70In the South, the desinence used for the infinitive -en, -n (< OE -an) remained until the endof 14th century and somewhat longer in monosyllabic forms, whereas in the Midlands -en, -n disap-peared earlier (Brunner 1970: 71)

and good characters as Jesus, Martha, Mary Magdalene or the convertedKing of Marseilles speak. It seems therefore that the -en serves as a socialmarker indicating fine and polite speech. Secondly, if we consider the sit-uation in which such a form occurs, we can see that this may be related tometrical scansion: the presence of the unnecessary Southern desinencemay be regarded as a way to create an additional syllable for the author’smetrical purposes. This is the case of l.898:

(5) The agreement of grace, her shewyn I will

This line is uttered by Jesus who is asking Mary and Martha to takehim to Lazarus’ burying place. Since it is the scene of Lazarus’ resur-rection, it must be very solemn. Christ’s words must be pronouncedwith special intensity and clarity, underlined by the alliteration of [g]and [r] in agreement and grace. Here, the line has a regular metrical pat-tern where the sequence of the anapaestic feet could be lost if the final–yn of shewyn had not occurred. Such an alternation is then taken upagain by Martha who says A, Lord, yower preseptt fulfyllyd xall be(l.899), as if perfect Christianity were associated with proper speech,though the parallelism is interrupted by an initial iamb: perfection onlypertains to God and not to human beings who can only aspire to it.

The occurrence of a final unnecessary Southern syllable is evenmore striking in the case of a disyllabic infinitive verb in l.1990:

(6) In flis deserte abydyn wyll wee

where thanks to the presence of the final -yn of abydyn the line is re-solved in an anapaestic trimeter (in which final wee is accented becauseof rhythmical reasons). The presence of a final anapaest seems con-firmed by the fact that all the lines (ll.1990-2002) forming the stanza inwhich Mary Magdalene speaks end with an anapaest: Mary can use ana-paests because by now she has been raised to the stature of a saintthanks to her purification obtained with thirty years of ascetic life.

Another function assigned to the unnecessary Southern infinitivedesinence of both monosyllabic and disyllabic verbs is that of accom-plishing a rhyme pattern which would not be possible without this South-ern variant. An example is given by the following rhyme (ll.164-166):

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(7) How sey fle phylyssoverys be my ryche reyne?Am nat I fle grettest governowur?Lett me ondyrstond whatt can ye seyn!

and by the rhyme indicated below (ll.1327-1330):

(8) IMPERATOR. Crafty was fler connyng, fle soth for to seyn!Thys pystyll I wyll kepe wyth me yff I can,Also I wyll have cronekyllyd fle �ere and fle reynne,flat nevyr xall be forgott, whoso loke fleron.

The rhymes reyn/seyn (ll.164-166) and seyn/reynne (ll.1327-1330)would not perfectly rest on [εn]8 of reyne (< Old French (henceforthOF) reigne, raigne, rengne) and of seyn (< OE secgan), if the occur-rence of the infinitive inflectional ending -yn typical of the Southernand Eastern dialects (Mossé 1991: 76) did not occur. The same is truefor the perfect rhymes in (9) (ll.507-510), (10) (ll.1011-1014), (11)(ll.1708-1711), and (12) (ll.1749-1752), all of them possible thanks tothe presence of the final -(e)n desinence:

(9) LUXSURYA. Lady, flis man is for �ow, as I se can,To sett yow i[n] sporttys and talkyng flis tyde!

MARY. Cal hym in, tavernere, as �e my loue wyll han,And we xall make ful mery yf he wolle abyde!

where the rhyme rests on [æn], as both can (from OE cunnan with a ofthe Modern English (henceforth ModE) form deriving from the indica-tive present–stem ic cann) and han (from OE habban) have etymologi-cal OE a;

(10) MARY MAGDLEYN. Now to fle monument lett vs gon,Wheras ower Lord and Savyower layd was,To anoynt hym, body and bone,To make amendys for ower trespas.

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80The original palatal realization of -gn absent in the English sound–system, was resolved intoan alveolar [n] preceded by a [] glide (Pope 1934: 450). The diphthong developed in this way coa-lesced with ME ei with which it shared the GVS developments.

in which the rhyme might rest on [o�n] of gon (< OE gan) and bone (<OE ban), as both words have radical OE a which developed to late OE Øand then to late ME Ø. due to the GVS;

(11) REX. Wyff, syn flat �e woll take flis wey of pryse,flerto can I no more seyn.Now Jhesu be ower gyd, flat is hye justyce,And flis blyssyd womman, Mary Mavgleyn!

where the rhyme rests on [εn] of seyn (< OE secgan) and mavgleyn(< Latin (henceforth L) Magdalena or < OF maudlin), which also seemsthe realization of the rhyme:

(12) REX. A, my dere wyffe, no dred �e have,Butt trost in Mary Mavdleyn,And she from perellys xall vs save!To God for vs she woll prayyn.

where, in prayyn (< OF preier), OF ei entered ME and coalesced withnative ei with which it followed the lowering to ME ai and the conse-quent development to late ME. The presence of the final Southerndesinence –yn in prayyn is here clearly added to accomplish the rhyme,as the same verb appears as pray, without the Southern ending, in therhyme formed by ll.1682-1684:

(13) To allmythy God he halp me pray,And he xall crestyn yow from fle fynddys powyr,In fle syth of God an hye!

and in the rhyme (ll.1693-1696):

(14) REGINA. Now, worshepfull lord, of a bone I yow pray,And it be pleseyng to yower hye dygnite.

REX. Madam, yower dysyere onto me say.What bone is flat �e desyere of me?

There is an interesting rhyme (ll.534-535) in which a monosyllabicverb with the Southern desinence -en rhymes with the word ten whichhas been misleadingly regarded by modern editors as the number ‘ten’and not as a verb.

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(15) CORIOSTE. Now, be my trowth, �e be wyth other ten.Felle a pese, tavernere, let vs sen—

Most scholars, disregarding the existence of the rhyme, have emend-ed the sentence with other ten in various ways: Adams (1924: 235), oneof the first editors of Mary Magdalene, emended the expression ‘withother things grieved’; yet, at this stage Mary is showing no sign of grief:Mary is dancing with Curiosity, one of the deadly sins, and is actuallyleaving the mode of living of the perfect Christian to follow the wrongteachings of the Devil. For this reason Baker / Murphy / Hall (1982: 204)claimed that ten is actually a scribal error and that ten is the cardinalnumber. Grantley (1983: 352), on the other hand, supposes that ten is thepast participle of the verb ten (< OE teon) meaning ‘to lead, to draw’.Hence the whole line could be rendered “now, by my troth, you are ledby another”, referring to the dance and in a more sinister sense, to thecorruption of Mary’s soul. These interpretations can be true and there areapparently no clues to what is the right one. Yet, none of these editors hasever etymologically reconstructed the word taking into consideration therhyme in which ten occurs. If we consider the rhyme, we can easily disre-gard Baker / Murphy / Hall’s (1982) claims: if ten were the cardinal num-ber, it should be pronounced as [ten] which clashes with the fact that theword is rhyming with sen, the Southern infinitive form of ‘to see’, whichhere should be pronounced as ME s„. n. Only Grantley’s interpretation canbe accepted because it is certainly supported by the rhyme, which per-fectly rests on [i�n] of ten and of sen ‘see’ (< OE seon), since both hadOE eo > [ø�] which coalesced with the existing ME e sharing with it thelater GVS developments. That is a clear example of how the rhyme canhelp us to eliminate the ambiguity surrounding the etymological inter-pretation of any forms regarded by modern editors as ‘scribal errors’.

3.3. Etymological reconstructions.

Another ambiguous rhyme is expert / desert found in the stanzaformed by ll.686-691:

(16) JHESUS. Woman, in contryssyon flou art expert,And in fli sowle hast inward mythe,That sumtyme were in desert,

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And from therknesse hast porchasyd lyth.Thy feyth hath savyt pe, and made fle bryth!Wherfor I sey to fle, ‘Vade in pace’.

Ambiguity is due to the fact that the only two editors who try to in-terpret the lines give opposite meaning to l.688: Bevington (1975: 711)glosses the verse as ‘that deserves future grace’; Baker / Murphy / Hall(1982: 205-206) as ‘that before were in the desert’, and considers thedesert as the wasteland of the spirit in which Mary was before her re-pentance, since ll.686-689 emphasize the contrast of what has happenedbefore and after the repentance. If we look at the rhyme, it apparentlyrests either on unaccented [æɾt] > [əɾt] of desert (< OF desert, ‘an aridplace’) and on accented [æɾt] > [��ɾt] of desert (< OF desert, ‘what isdeserved’). As a matter of fact, the same distinction appears nowadaysas we have two different pronunciations for desert meaning ‘an aridplace’ (/ıdezət/; Wells 1990: 201) or desert meaning ‘what is deserved’(/diızə�t/; Wells 1990: 201). Although the author of the play apparentlyemploys the double sense desert might have (considering that Jesus isspeaking of light and brightness obtained by darkness, power from con-trition, and therefore ‘things to be deserved’ from the desert), if we lookat the rhyme, however, the kind of vowels occurring in the final syllableof both expert and desert seems to suggest that desert might have thesense emended by Bevington, that makes the rhyme very likely rest onfinal accented [æɾt] and which seems indirectly confirmed by the occur-rence of a less frequently-used Received Pronunciation (henceforth RP)of expert as [ekıspə�t] (Wells 1990: 260).

Another ambiguous that meaning can be explained thanks to rhymeis found in ll.893-896:

(17) JHESUS. Wher have �e put hym? Sey me thys.MARY MAGDALEN. In hys mo[nv]ment, Lord, is he.JHESUS. To that place �e me wys.

Thatt grave I desyre to se.

The rhyme occurs in a stanza which precedes the scene of Lazarus’resurrection and in a dialogue between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Theatmosphere is tense and moving as Jesus has not arrived in time to save

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Lazarus from death. We have already seen that Jesus, symbol of perfec-tion, cannot speak a corrupted language and for this reason we believethe rhyme must be perfect. Yet, Adams (1924: 242), Baker / Murphy /Hall (1982: 281) and Bevington (1975: 717) translate wys as the verb‘to guide’. This cannot be possible since, as we said above, Jesus’speech and rhyme must be perfect. On the contrary, we believe that theverb means ‘to point the way’ (see OED). The confusion might arisefrom the fact that the editors have regarded wys as deriving from OE*wısan (which had a late ME form wyse) and not from OE wıssian (ofwhich a late ME variant wys(se) existed). The rhyme clearly shows thatthe verb intended here is wys ‘to point out (the way)’; if so, it can per-fectly rest on [s] of thys (< OE ›es).

A comic relief scene occurs in ll.1186-1201, forming a stanza whichfollows an aaaa aaaa aaaa bb cc rhyme pattern: here is the hilarious‘Leccyo Mahowndys’ in which gibberish Latin is used by a boy who ismocking a pagan minister at the court of the king of Marseilles:

(18) Leccyo mahowndys, viri fortissimi sarasenorum:Glabriosum ad glvmandum glvmardinorum,Gormonoorum alocorum, stampatinantum cursorum,Cownthtys fulcatum, congrvryandum tersorum,Mursum malgorum, marara�orum,Skartum sialporum, fartum cardicutorum,Slavndri strovmppum, corbolcorum,Snyguer snagoer werwoliforumStandgardum lamba beffettorum,Strowtum stardy strangolcorum,Rygour dagour flapporum,Castratum raty rybaldorum,Howndys and hoggys, in heggys and hellys,Snakys and toddys mott be yower bellys!Ragnell and Roflyn, and other in fle wavys,Gravntt yow grace to dye on fle galows!

The ambiguous rhyme is in ll.1200-1201: ambiguity is created be-cause of the meaning given by the editors to the expression in fie wavys.Although Pollard (1890: 224c) emends wavys as wowes in order tomake it rhyme with gallows, Baker / Murphy / Hall (1982: 211) trans-late it as ‘in the way’. If Pollard’s intuition is right, then wowes derives

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from OE wawa and means ‘distress’, ‘trouble’, ‘misery’. Yet, wawysmight also be a variant for wough (< OE wØh, which in the inflectedforms developed to OE wØ�-), ‘evil’, common from the 9th century tothe 15th century (OED). If wavys derives from OE inflectional formwØ�-, it then developed to ME wow- [woυ] which, in accordance withthe GVS, changed to [wo�-] in the 16th century. In this case, the rhymemight be perfect, resting on late ME [oυz] of wavys and galows (< OEgal�a), in which final -ow, apparently considered as a diphthong,9 fol-lowed the above–mentioned developments. Further support derivingfrom a philological analysis of the rhyme is found in the following stan-za comprising ll.1297-1303:

(19) Soferyn, and it plese yower hye empyre,I have browth yow wrytyng of grett aprise,Wyche xall be pleseyng to yower desyre,From Pylatt, yower hye justyce.He sentt yow word wyth lowly intentt;In ewery place he kepytt yower cummavndement,As he is bovnd be hys ofyce.

Here, the stanza is following an ababccb tail-rhyming pattern. The b-lines obviously form a perfect rhyme on [s] of aprise (< OF apprise,‘thing learned’), iustyce (< OF justice) and of ofyce (< OF office), as inall words the original OF long vowel was shortened in ME because theOF stress was retracted (Bliss 1952: 139). The pronunciation of apryseas [a’pɾs] might be accounted for by analogy with the historical variantof words such as sacrifice, promise, etc. (see also Cercignani 1981:308). This also gives us a clue as to the real meaning of aprise which is‘information’ – a sense which in OED is recorded from 1303 to 1425 –and not ‘worth’, as it has been ‘translated’ by Bevington (1975: 729)and Baker / Murphy / Hall (1982: 233).

The last controversial rhyme is the one found in the following stanza(ll.1433-1438):

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90From RP of gallows as [ıæl�υz] it might be inferred that final ow was treated as adiphthong and not as a spelling variation of -us probably on analogy with the adjectival suffix -ousin which unaccented us developed to [əs].

(20) MASTYR. Of sheppyng ye xall natt faylle,For vs fle wynd is good and saffe.Yond fler is fle lond of Tork[y]eI wher full loth for to lye!Yendyr is fle lond of Satyllye—Of flis cors we thar nat abaffe

The rhyming pattern of this stanza is abc cab. The b-lines are take torhyme on [æ�f] of saffe (< OF sauf) and of abaffe (< OE intensive a +be–æftan ‘behind’, ‘back’). Since the word abaffe apparently stands fora plural present, it cannot be translated as ‘abashed’ (Bevington 1975:733), but as ‘turn back’ (Baker / Murphy / Hall 1982: 231), also consid-ering the fact that OED quotes the entries abaft ‘backwards (of direc-tion)’ (in 1275 only), and baft ‘back (of position), with reference to theback of ship’ (but in this case it derives from OE beæftan, now archaic,used from the 9th to the 19th century; see also MED).10

4. Conclusion.

For a present-day researcher who takes for granted the analysis madeby previous editors, however great their input has been to the creationand development of theories related to the study of the ME period, themetrical scansion and the rhyme pattern of Mary Magdalene may be be-wildering, chaotic and ambiguous, not only because the play is an im-perfect copy characterized by the lack of any norms of spelling, but alsoand above all because it is taken for granted that the play is to be readsilently. Yet, Mary Magdalene is a play, which implies that it must beperformed, and spelling is not so important so long as the metricalstructure is safeguarded.

What modern editors term inconsistencies are actually incorrect ormisleading etymological interpretations of peculiar diatopic and di-achronic forms. If there were any inconsistencies, they were not neces-sarily the scribe’s fault. In fact, variants may have a clearly marked so-

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100The form of this verb has not been found in the Etymological Dictionary of the EnglishLanguage, the English Dialect Dictionary, MED, the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, theOED, or in Stratman (1891).

cial function: they are used when noble people speak, when Jesus is onstage, when important characters play a crucial Catholic role in the playitself. Yet, these variants are also prosodic devices, as we can see in thecase of the pleonastic use of the verb to do, in the adoption of the South-ern infinitive desinence in mono- and disyllabic verbs, which were nec-essary to accomplish the rhyme or to create an additional syllable formetrical reasons. Further, we have seen that some words, especially intail-rhyming stanzas, are not inconsistent when their correct etymologyis taken into consideration; they were actually modern editors’ inconsis-tencies, who have not been able to see that the rhyme in which such‘scribal misspellings’ occurred played a fundamental role in the identifi-cation of the real etymological meaning.

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